Some casket designs incorporate decorative or ornamental corner pieces (“corner ornaments”) secured to the casket during fabrication thereof. In many, if not most, prior designs, these corner ornaments are rigidly affixed to the casket shell. Consequently, if a customer purchasing the casket is not pleased with the particular pre-installed corner ornament, and wishes to customize the casket exterior to his or her taste, the funeral director must go through a lengthy and complicated process to first remove the original corner ornaments and then reinstall the corner ornaments chosen by the customer. This process typically requires manual manipulation and access to the interior of the casket which may require the removal of bedding, lining, and the like. Such a process is time consuming and can damage the otherwise new casket and is thus frowned upon and generally avoided by the funeral director.
To more effectively market caskets, the funeral director desires to offer a wide variety of corner ornaments from which a customer can select according to the customer's taste. However, to offer such a wide selection, and to avoid the undesirable practice mentioned above, the funeral director would have to maintain a large inventory of many different casket material/finish and corner ornament combinations, which is also undesirable. To minimize the required inventory of finished caskets, the funeral director could simply have one casket of each material/finish, provided that the funeral director had some means providing for the quick and efficient changing of the corner ornaments on each casket. As such, the customer could quickly view numerous corner ornaments on a single casket, and the funeral director would need only stock a single casket of each material/finish. Prior casket designs, which rigidly affix the corner ornaments, do not permit such quick and efficient changing of the corner ornaments as discussed above.
What is needed, therefore, is an attachment mechanism to permit the quick and efficient installation and removal of corner ornaments onto and from caskets.
One innovation which addresses the aforementioned need is disclosed in the assignee's U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,928,706 and 6,591,466, both hereby incorporated by reference herein. These patents disclose and claim apparatus for removably securing an ornament to a casket shell comprising a first attachment element adapted to be operably associated with the casket, and a second attachment element adapted to be operably associated with the ornament. One of the attachment elements is a keyhole groove having a hole portion and a groove portion, and the other attachment element is a fastener with a head on it that fits in the keyhole groove. The fastener head is inserted into the hole portion and slid into the groove portion. The sides of the groove portion, being narrower than the diameter of the fastener head, retain the fastener head therebehind thereby securing the ornament to the shell. To enhance the security of the connection of the ornament to the shell, the groove can be shaped such that the ornament is removably secured to the shell via motion in first and second non-parallel directions generally parallel to a plane defined by the shell surface to which the ornament is being attached.
Typically a casket includes decorative top mold and base mold at the upper and lower edges, respectively of the sides and ends of the shell. From an aesthetic standpoint it is desirable for the decorative corner ornament to extend completely from the top mold down to the base mold, in other words for the upper surface of the decorative corner ornament to abut the lower surface of the top mold and for the lower surface of the decorative corner ornament to abut the upper surface of the base mold. Depending on the orientation selected for the keyhole groove of the '466 and '706 patents, the direction of movement required to install the corner ornament of the '466 and '706 patents may dictate that the ornament be shorter than the distance between the lower surface of the top mold and the upper surface of the base mold, which as mentioned above is aesthetically undesirable.
It is desirable to provide further innovation in the area of quick change casket ornaments which does not require the ornament to be of a height less than the distance between the lower surface of the top mold and the upper surface of the base mold.